We’ve been helping them do this by working with the team to collaborate with external stakeholders online. By building a network of influencers, we were then able to tap into new audiences who were highly relevant to the campaign.

After initial research, we tested out how a partnership with these influencers would work, using a pilot. As a result, we collected some solid evidence of how the approach encourages long-term engagement around the campaign.

But this learning through piloting proved more powerful than that.

It was this pilot which helped the organisation realise that new digital tools and skills are critical to the future of the business. In turn, this prompted discussions around the need to change the internal culture in order to do more of this.

This, for me, is the most exciting part of my job – helping organisations, like this one, to become more agile to adapt to the new challenges of the changing world.

The Internet is one of the biggest developments in recent times but digital disruption doesn’t have to be a blocker – there really are some great opportunities that come with it. It’s simply a web of information ready to be tapped into.

Simon de Cintra (Act Naturally co-founder/ actor/ coach) visited our offices on Friday to talk to us about communication.

Simon started with a story about the first televised presidential debate, which was between Nixon and Kennedy in the 1960’s. This was a time when Televisions weren’t widely available and there was a massive divide between the people who heard the radio vs. those that saw Nixon and Kennedy on their TV sets – essentially, it turned out that those with a TV voted for Kennedy, but those who listened to the radio voted for Nixon. You can only imagine why*.

There is something important here. It seems that appearances really do matter in business. A persons behaviour and how they present themselves has a tremendous impact on the way others experience them.

This suggests to me that ‘trust’ is instinctive. It’s about the way it makes us feel as well as what’s being said.

In the theme of politics (because of course, trust is extremely important here), the Charlie Brooker C4 drama series, Black Mirror, recently devoted an entire episode to the theme of the lack of trust in the political sphere. (By the way, if you haven’t seen any of the series, you really should check it out!)

Essentially, the idea was that the public became to trust a cartoon character, ‘Waldo’ (and voted for ‘him’) over the actual politicians.

But Waldo, of course, isn’t real and the fact is, no one cares. For the execs and the general public, Waldo is just as real as the rest, and just as trustworthy. In this way, Brooker makes the case that we are only steps away from artificial politicians.

It feels to me like the tide is changing, and the public are more likely to cast a “none of the above” vote in protest to what is perceived as a lack of trustworthiness among our Members of Parliament – it is widely believed that the recent Eastleigh by-election proves that. You’ve all heard the joke, “why did Nick Clegg cross the road? Because he said he wouldn’t.”.